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The Brighton Magazine

Selected Brighton Magazine Article

Tuesday 19 September 2017

Concrete And Gold: Foo Fighters Find Fresh Pastures On New Album

"I wanted it to be the biggest sounding Foo Fighters record ever. To make a gigantic rock record but with Greg Kurstin's sense of melody and arrangement… Motorhead's version of Sgt. Pepper… or something like that."

So speaks Dave Grohl of the mission statement made manifest in Foo Fighters' ninth epic, the aptly-titled Concrete and Gold, due out this Friday.

Concrete and Gold marries some of the most insanely heavy Foo Fighters riffs ever with lush harmonic complexities courtesy of a first time team-up with producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia, Pink).

The unlikely alliance with Greg came about through a bizarre sequence of surprise musical obsessions and chance encounters:

Listening to the radio during a drive roughly four years ago, Grohl first heard Again and Again by Kurstin's band The Bird & The Bee—"It blew my mind… it was so much more sophisticated than anything I"d ever heard and I became obsessed."

Some months later, Grohl would randomly spot and fanboy out over "the guy from The Bird & The Bee!"a/k/a Greg Kurstin.

The two became fast friends over common musical loves with Grohl learning that his new favourite band had been on hiatus due to Kurstin's workload as a producer.

While Foo Fighters recorded and released Sonic Highways, broke some bones and packed stadiums and arenas on one of the top five grossing tours of 2015, and gifted fans with the St. Cecilia EP, "Greg was becoming one of the biggest producers in the world," Grohl recalls.

With the writing and recording of the next Foo Fighters album on the horizon, Grohl was eager as always to find fresh challenges for the band:

"So I think maybe Greg is the guy that we ask to be our producer because he's never made a heavy rock record before and we"ve never worked with a pop producer."

Darrel Thorp (Beck, Radiohead) was soon enlisted to mix and engineer.

This collective conceived a blueprint of the new record as "Motorhead's version of Sgt. Pepper... or something like that," secretly booking into Hollywood's esteemed EastWest studios to consummate this marriage of extremes... or as Grohl puts it: "Our noise and Greg"s big brain and all of his sophisticated arrangements and composition."

Carleen Anderson has been hailed by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, as 'phenomenal and one of a kind' and now, for Brighton Fesival 20018, she's joining ranks with virtuoso pianist Nikki Yeoh, and Mercury Music Prize-winning rapper Speech Debelle.

Roger Daltrey is set to release new solo album, As Long As I Have You, which features Pete Townshend's inimitable guitar on seven tracks as well as guest performances from Mick Talbot on keyboards (Dexys, The Style Council).

Snow Patrol will return later this spring with Wildness, their first album in seven years, which finds the band searching for clarity, connection, and meaning, while staying true to the melodic songwriting prowess that brought them to prominence.

The sexual health and contraception (SHAC) team in Brighton will be using new visual aids to help overcome female patients' embarrassment and stigma about their bodies after receiving a donation from Brighton artist, Jamie McCartney.

Rating

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